Gods’ Games We Play, Vol. 5, page 8
With the occasional anxious glance at the looming nectar droplet, everyone else ran as fast as they could, right up until the final second.
“Three! Two! One! Aaand that’s all, folks!”
…Plop. The thirtieth droplet fell into the timer, and it overflowed.
The nectar came pouring out, almost audibly. The undeniable, incontrovertible sign that time was up. The meep would blow its whistle to signal the end of the match. Yes, right at that very moment.
Or so everyone thought.
“Kyaaa-ha-ha-ha! We win! And what a win! C’mon, ref, blow that whistle already……! Uh, ref?”
The nymphs looked around, confused.
The forest remained resolutely silent. No whistle sounded. The meep simply held the whistle in hand, not acknowledging that the nectar clock had overflowed.
“…………”
“Hey, Meep! What’re you doing over there? You can see the timer! It—”
“Everybody, run!” Fay shouted, loud enough to blow away the nymphs’ objections. He was pointing at one very specific spot on the court. “Over there!”
“Fay?! What’s this all about?!” Captain Ashlan said.
He was just as confused as the nymphs, who blustered, “What? What?! What’s going on? Why are the humans still moving? The game’s supposed to be over!”
Nobody seemed to understand what was happening—not the gods and not the humans.
Which was why Fay chose that moment to announce to all the players, “Time to check our answers.” Then he added:
“There’s forty-three seconds of additional time in this game!”
“Huh?!”
“Say what?!”
All the members of the gods’ team started chattering among themselves.
Additional time: A special exception provided in games like soccer in cases where the game time had stopped, such as when switching out players. If the game time was thirty minutes, the clock would be extended by the amount of time that been excluded so that the players could play for the full half hour.
“Theoretically, it should be the same in God-Tree-Fruit Basketball—any time lost should be provided as extra time!” Fay said.
“…?”
None of the nine gods had anything to say to that. In fact, they hardly understood what this human was talking about. What did he think he was saying?
The issue for them was that additional time was an impossibility in God-Tree-Fruit Basketball. In this game, the timer was simply always running—that was the rule. Player substitutions took place as part of the game, so there shouldn’t have been any lost time to make up.
Yet this human was claiming there were forty-three seconds of it?
“Oh, it was there, all right,” Fay said. He looked back as he ran across the field—and pointed to the meep holding the whistle. “I told you then. That was my secret trick for grabbing victory in this game!”
“?!”
The god team started buzzing again. Those few words, of course, were enough for the wise and knowing gods to understand what had happened.
“Human! You used the meep as a shield because…”
“That’s right. I wanted to force a stop to the game.”
When Nel had been in extremis, Fay had flung the meep at her—and the meep had said…
“Interfering with the referee is outside the bounds of play!”
It was a moment outside the playtime, officially acknowledged by the referee.
With the meep’s outburst, the game had been temporarily suspended—which was when Fay knew that extra time was at least theoretically possible.
“We spent forty-three seconds before resuming the game! This match isn’t over!”
Every plan had a counterplan. This final strategy, “extra time,” could counter the gods’ plan.
Plan—Points Efficiency: Vulnerable to time expiring. (10-point ball neutralized.)
(countered by)
Plan—Remaining Time Zero: Stall until time expires and use the 10-point ball to win by the minimum penalty.
(countered by)
Plan—Extra Time: Extend the game time and win without allowing time to expire.
There was just one thing: After the forty-three seconds of extra time were up, the clock would still be at zero. That couldn’t be changed.
“Kya-ha-ha! All right, I’m a little impressed! But what good will it do you?”
“You have another thirty seconds at best of this time you’ve gained. We have the balls. The goal is fifty meters over your heads, and the Goalie Bear is waiting for you.”
It was true: The wise and knowing gods also understood how short-lived Fay’s little plan would be.
There would be no dramatic comebacks in forty-three seconds. To do that, they would need the balls—and the god team held all of them.
“That’s a little problem we solve…like this!” In center court, Leshea’s eyes were gleaming. She grabbed Anita by the collar and wound up like a baseball pitcher.
“What? What?! Treasured sister Leshea, may I ask—?”
“All right, Anita! You remember how it went last time. Go grab that ten-point ball!”
“Noooooo!”
“Aaaaaand go!”
Anita, fired forward with all the force of a former god’s strength, found herself launched like a rocket—straight at the dryad holding the ten-point ball.
The same dryad who had dropped to the ground, assured of the gods’ time’s-up victory.
“Wha—?!”
It was the first time the bright green being had shown the slightest hint of shock. After an instant of indecision about whether to simply take the blow or try to avoid it, the dryad clutched the ball close and threw itself to the side, using all the quickness of the divine team’s nimblest players.
Boom!
It couldn’t have been a difference of more than 0.01 seconds.
Anita, the human cannonball, shot past the dryad and was buried deep into Yggdrasil’s goal tree, behind the god.
“That was a clever way of trying to turn things around, I’ll give you that. And you were this close,” the dryad said, clearly relieved to have evaded the play by a hair’s breadth. “But now you are out of ideas.”
“No, that was perfect!”
“Hmm?”
“Y’know, I’ve just felt like something hasn’t quite been right recently.” Leshea twirled a strand of her hair, red as fire, around one finger, and made an exaggeratedly thoughtful face. “I’m supposed to be a former god, you know? But lately Pearl and Nel have been getting all the glory. And that’s okay, I guess, I’ve just been wanting…I’ve been wanting to win in a way that’s more like me. You know what I mean?”
“…?”
The divine team did not appear to know what she meant.
Look at the situation she was in. What could she be talking about?
Crack.
That was when a crack ran down the trunk of the great tree of Yggdrasil behind the gods. It started from the point of Anita’s impact and went from there.
“But what’s a me-like win?” Leshea continued to muse. “I think it’s got to be something that’s within the rules of the game, but at the last possible second, where I use my former godlike powers to snatch victory.”
Crack… Creak…
It didn’t stop at a single crack; the noises from the tree got louder and more numerous.
“I remember something the meep said. It told us to use the whole forest to achieve victory.”
Wasn’t that what the divine team had done? They’d used the grass on the ground, summoned “lemmings” from the woods, and controlled the very roots of Yggdrasil’s trees. The players could use anything and everything in the forest—that was what gave this game its spice.
And thus Leshea gave a particularly bright smile and said…
“So it’s all right if we knock over your goal, isn’t it?”
“What?!”
The gods turned and watched in amazement as Yggdrasil’s massive tree began to lean at a distinct angle, creaking all the while.
Leshea hadn’t been aiming her human rocket at the ten-point ball—she’d wanted to give the great tree’s trunk one more giant whack.
Yggdrasil had already absorbed the strength of the gods twice, shaking to its roots each time.
By now, the treant was like a runaway train, and it wasn’t stopping. It slammed into the first solid object in its path—the great tree of Yggdrasil on the god team’s side.
Anita did, in fact, grab the ten-point ball out of the air. Her momentum then sent her rocketing toward the divine team’s huge tree, with which she collided with a tremendous bang.
“I’ll bet if we did that one more time, we could knock Yggdrasil’s sprout-tree right over!”
This was the third and final time.
Pushed over the edge by Anita, the human missile, Yggdrasil’s great tree fell over with a tremendous crash.
“A-all right, but what purpose does that serve?!”
“Puuuuuushhh!”
From just behind the center of the field, the gods heard every human on the other team scream and shout. The gods looked at them with amazement.
The ground-bound fruit. The one-shot win that everyone had forgotten about.
Its virtually limitless weight meant no one could pick it up, but now Fay, Nel, Pearl, Captain Ashlan, and the entire human team were gathered around it.
“Everyone push together! All at once, now!” Captain Ashlan bellowed.
Crrrk…
The humans all shoved until they were red-faced—and the ground-bound fruit began to move, a few scant centimeters at a time. They were pushing it…
…toward the toppled tree. Toward the white flower that bloomed among its branches.
The court was some fifty meters long.
And the goal flower grew fifty meters up in the great tree’s branches.
They matched up perfectly: If Yggdrasil’s tree fell, the goal flower would topple precisely, inexorably onto the ground-bound fruit.
People think ball games mean getting the ball to the goal, but who says so?
If the ball was too heavy to carry, then just bring the goal to the ball.
This was the true core of the “extra time” plan. An upset victory that was achievable with the forty-three seconds added to the clock—while the divine team, who had dismissed the possibilities of those forty-three seconds, reacted nowhere near in time.
Not to stop the great tree from falling.
Not to change the direction of its fall with wind magic.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t about being in time at all.
Having been brought to the brink of such an elaborate upset, maybe they simply stood and watched. All of them did. They watched as Yggdrasil’s tree fell toward center court…
…and the huge flower that served as the goal slammed directly into the bright red ground-bound fruit.
“Scorrre! It’s an instant win with the ground-bound fruit. Our final score is one hundred million, twenty-two points to twenty. By being the first to reach fifty points, the human team wins!”
Yggdrasil’s forest resounded with the sound of the meep’s whistle.
2
About half an hour later…
“Wait, Yggdrasil’s trees can fall over and then just…get back up?!”
“It is a divine tree.”
“Er… Yeah. I guess that makes sense.” Captain Ashlan scratched his head and smiled wryly.
After having been so dramatically knocked over, the huge tree was now simply raising itself back up into place, like a bop bag. Fay wouldn’t pretend to understand how it worked, but like the meep had said, Yggdrasil was divine. He was content to leave it at that.
“Urgh… My head’s still spinning,” groaned Anita, who lay spread-eagle on the grass. “Treasured sister Leshea…erm…I’m sure glad we won and all, but I don’t know about…this.”
“I couldn’t be more satisfied! It’s been so long since I got to show off my awesomeness to help us claim a win!” Leshea’s eyes gleamed with an unmistakable sense of accomplishment.
Then there was the gods’ team, which had gathered in the center of the playing field, where they were debriefing. All ten of them, the Goalie Bear included, had gathered as soon as the game was over to discuss.
“I’m telling you! You should have stopped that last human missile, Treant!”
“……………”
“What? You didn’t wanna ’cause it would hurt? Come on, you can survive a scratch like that!”
“There were other possible plays. If the humans are going to knock down the tree, perhaps we could have the Goalie Bear tear the goal off the branch,” the dryads suggested.
Then the nymphs clapped their hands and said, “Oh, yeah! Hey, you! Humans! Did ya know? In the gods’ games, you can get special rewards by fulfilling special victory conditions.”
“Just what I’ve been waiting for!” Captain Ashlan said, turning eagerly toward them.
The rate of human victories in the gods’ games hovered somewhere below 10 percent. So apostles who not only won, but took special kinds of victories, could be rewarded.
God’s Love: Awarded for winning a game without a single casualty.
God’s Diadem: Awarded for defeating a previously undefeated god for the first time.
In this case, it was the latter. The guardians of Yggdrasil’s forest were meeting the humans for the first time—so although it wasn’t the same as with Uroboros, whom humanity had tried and failed to best for centuries, this team was still officially undefeated.
“What do we get?!” Ashlan exclaimed.
“Oh, we’ve got something great for you. Okay, here it comes…is what I’d like to say. Buuut…” The nymphs turned and looked first at Fay, then Leshea, Nel, and Pearl. “How many do you all have?”
“Sorry?”
“I mean! How many rewards? How many do you have?”
“Oh. You mean the Gods’ Diadems.”
Fay thought back over his career in the games, counting the “loot” he’d acquired from the gods.
From Uroboros, the Undefeated God: the Eye of Uroboros, a treasure (or trash, depending on how you looked at it) that caused the player diving to always encounter Uroboros.
From the God of the Sun Army, Mahtma II: the Sun Flower. Legend says that it can summon the sun.
From Anubis, the God of the Underworld: the Treasure Hall Master Key, which enables the user to summon any one item from the Labyrinth of Lucemia.
“I have three,” Fay said.
“Awwwwwwwww! What! A! Shame!” The nymphs sighed, sounding genuinely sympathetic but also distinctly amused. “Three is the maximum number of rewards you can receive.”
“Say what?!”
Who knew there was an inventory limit?
Fay and his team were the only ones to run afoul of this maximum, but apparently Captain Ashlan, Anita, and the others who had been in the game with them were to be denied any reward as well.
“N-now just a second, please!” Pearl said, immediately jumping forward. “I think I have an idea, Rainbow Flutter Bug!”
“The word you’re looking for is nymph.”
“We have this reward, the Eye of Uroboros, that we totally don’t need at all, like not even a little bit! Maybe we could trade it in so that everyone can get their reward?!”
“No way!” The nymphs gave an amused snort. “Awww, I really feel for you. If you drink Yggdrasil’s Sap, your Arise becomes a hundred times more powerful. It’s great stuff. Oh well. Them’s the breaks. Bye-bye, now!”
“Whaaaaaaat?!”
“Noooooooo! I knew we should’ve thrown away Uroboros’s Eye! It’s cursed; it has to be!”
The apostles’ despair echoed around the forest.
Fay and the rest returned to the human world.
Vs. The God-Tree Guardians—WIN.
Game: God-Tree-Fruit Basketball.
Time Elapsed: 30 minutes, 43 seconds.
Win Condition 1: Score 50 points.
Win Condition 2: If time expires, the team with the higher score wins.
Other: Four fruits/balls are used simultaneously.
If time expires, a special calculation called the minimum penalty will be applied.
Dropped Item: Yggdrasil’s Sap—Not Obtained.
Dropped on Difficulty: Mythic.
3
In an office in the Arcane Court’s Ruin branch, the clicking of a keyboard could be heard.
The sound came from Chief Secretary Miranda’s desk.
“Hmm, okay. So you can’t possess more than three God’s Diadems at most. That’s new info. Good work, Fay.”
“Thanks… Unfortunately, that good work left Captain Ashlan feeling awfully disappointed.”
“You got another precious win. To hope for more than that is greedy.” Miranda seemed to be in a staring contest with the screen. She’d been questioning Fay for almost two hours. “Just to be clear,” she said. “The gods’ games go up in difficulty when you’ve won five or more victories—is that right?”
“That’s right, Chief Secretary Miranda,” said Nel, who was sitting on the end of the sofa. She nodded vigorously.
“It sure made the game a lot harder—like we say in the report,” Leshea offered.
“Okay, well, that confirms it. We got an awful lot of valuable information straight from the god’s mouth for a single game. Talkative deity, huh?” Miranda sipped her coffee, looking positively happy. Normally she would have been in a bad mood after working so late, grumbling about “a sleepless night” being “the enemy of good skin,” but tonight was one of the rare exceptions.
Fay and his team had added another victory to their total, and they had gotten some very useful information as well.
“That does it for the post-game interview. This is where I’d like to tell you to go back to your rooms and get some rest, but on that subject…” Miranda stood up and looked at the occupants of the sofa: Fay, Nel, and Leshea, along with Pearl, who could barely keep her eyes open under the sandman’s assault. “Lady Uroboros had something to talk to you about. Have you heard already?”
